The Daily

Seven Star Fist

This seven-song debut EP — available for free download at rawkause.bandcamp.com — is nearly wall-to-wall verbiage, except for those instances where Rawkause, wisely, lets SA producer MyOwnStyleZ’s beat ride for a minute. The combination of elegant classical strings and unvarnished drum machines, modernized occasionally with minimalistic synth blips makes a complementary match for Rawkause’s gruff-yet-cerebral swagger. Warning shot “Universal Energy,” a throwback to the dense mid-’90s verses that ransacked scientific and metaphysical terms in search of a new slang, sets the tone: “Accomplice to crimes against your own mind/ your own kind/ Now who walks a curved line?/ Tangents of plastic memories lie/ Inside, suffocating on the first light/ To behold to be more, to be great/ Dormant thoughts in your allegorical cave.” And so on. Rawkause handles this stuff with such precision that the more personal, easier to digest closer “Walk With Me,” is almost anticlimactic. Keep an eye on both these guys.